Diaspora doesn’t exist yet, at least not in the public sphere. So far, it appears to be little more than an idea. But the developers building Diaspora describe it as “the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.”
Four NYU Courant Institute graduates have raised $200,000 to build Diaspora, and to challenge Facebook and Twitter for a piece of the social networking pie.
Webster’s dictionary defines diaspora as “the movement, migration, or scattering of a people away from an established or ancestral homeland.”
The folks building Diaspora talk about seeds. A Diaspora “seed” is a personal web server that stores all of your information and shares it with your friends.
“When you have a Diaspora seed of your own, you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity,” the Diaspora crew described the project in April.
Diaspora is supposed to be done by the end of summer, which is quickly approaching, so we’ll have to see what it looks like. The source code is going to be open source with a GPL license.
